Aphid Day is Oct 4, 2026. I’ve been seeing a few aphids in previous days. Today they gave a nice clear signal that summer is over. This summer was milder than usual thanks to Nature, but holocaustier than usual thanks to our fucked “city” “government” and Catholic Criminalities cultivating and feeding a dozen crazed arsonists.
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Here’s a picture of an aphid on the windowscreen from 2014.
This is the seventeenth time I’ve noted it here. Systematizing the dates this year…
10/01/2010
10/31/2011
09/27/2012
10/24/2013
09/29/2014
09/24/2015
09/28/2016
10/19/2017
10/17/2018
10/16/2019
11/04/2020
10/03/2021
10/08/2022
10/07/2023
09/28/2024
10/09/2025
10/04/2026
= = = = = BELOW HERE IS REPRINT of the 2010 original.
Every year in Spokane the end of summer is marked by the swarming of tiny white-winged flies.
Insects don’t waste much time in adulthood; lots of bugs live several years as larvae and only a few days as adults.
These flies take it to an extreme. Adults are minimally equipped to get in the air and reproduce. They don’t have as much brain power as other flies, nor do they have hard shells. Instead of flying purposefully, they drift with the wind like seeds, and die as soon as they bump into anything even at near-zero drifting speed. Result: for a couple of days, your face and clothes are covered with semi-liquid insects.
Despite their lack of navigation, they must have some kind of superior instinct or ‘community intelligence’, because picking the last warm day is much harder than picking the first warm day of spring. Termites and ants don’t need to calculate their swarming day; they only need a simple neuron to detect when temperature rises past a certain threshold, plus an emitted pheromone to trigger the avalanche.
But how do these flies determine that today is not just warm, but the last warmth for their generation? They must be sensing something besides temperature.
At any rate, they serve as a reliable sign for us, even if our supercomputers can’t match their calculations.
Polistra has put it into folk-wisdom format:
White flies swarming, no more warming.
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[Artistic note: the swarm in the animation turned out nicely, but Polistra’s head looks steroid-swollen and South-Park-ish for unknown reasons. Maybe she’s allergic to the bugs.]
[Technical note: According to some sources, these bugs are smoky-winged ash aphids, Prociphilus americanus.]
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